Men are from Microsoft, women are from Apple?

I went to see Something’s Gotta Give recently and noted what appears to be a recently-established convention of romantic comedy and related genres. The sensitive, intellectual one (normally the woman) always has a Mac (more precisely, a late model Powerbook), while the opposite-to-attract has a Windows machine (also a laptop, brand depends on who bids most for product placement). This seems a pretty good convention to me.

Well I guess you have a point.. I think I remember it being maybe the reverse in ‘You’ve Got Mail’. But i think I have also seen it in the reverse… however I can’t quite cite any examples right now. Here’s another point. I’ve seen a lot of cases where Evil uses PCs..and the ‘good’ folks use macs. Hmm… now which moives did I see that in. Ahhh…’Omega Code’… gosh..don’t you just hate when you can’t remember something… ughh…ok…now I have a headache..

The Macintosh has been placed strategically in many (very many) movies over the last 10 years because they are great eye-candy! I don’t think that they are being assigned to the female gender because macs are preferred by women or look more feminine.

I realize you are specifically talking about Romantic comedies and such but I still disagree.

Thanks to TAOofPooh, we get the following listing at Mac Sightings on You’ve Got Mail, which, I think was the originator of the convention to which I referred.

Meg Ryan has an original PowerBook G3 that she uses to sign on to AOL and send IMs to Tom Hanks, who uses a clunky IBM Thinkpad. Of course, Meg is the one who seems friendlier and more fun-loving in the movie.

I allus wondered why I couldn’t get a Mac to do anything. I should have used hormones.

Seriously, Macs are not for the hacker (which is mostly a male thing) because they are too hard to pull apart or reconfigure. Similarly for the OS (apart from XP which is why most computer people hate it).

I also contend that the beautifully designed Macs should only be seen in a room with polished blonde pine floorboards, whereas a PC would be happy sitting in a shed. Ipso facto (real) blokes like PCs. Maybe Bunnings should start selling Black&Decker Pentium 4s..

I’m a Mac consultant and I do see a lot of women clients. So I almost agree with you there.

As far as the movie goes, there is a simple explanation. Jack Nicholson’s color in the movie was black, Diane Keaton’s was white. One part of the movie dealt with black rocks and white rocks. The TiBook wasn’t quite white, but it fit in with her color scheme. Apple doesn’t make a black laptop, so he got some other brand.